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Female Infertility

Research on the Effects of Acupuncture to Improve Fertility

Today, acupuncture is one of the most studied alternative fertility treatments. Recent studies show that acupuncture may significantly increase pregnancy rates. Below are some of the relevant publications on clinical trials of IVF acupuncture – and it is studies like these that are increasing the confidence of physicians and fertility specialists in the benefits of acupuncture.

The pregnancy rate was 31% in the acupuncture group and 23% in the control group. The ongoing pregnancy rate at 18 weeks was higher in the treatment group (28% vs. 18%). Results suggest that acupuncture was safe for women undergoing ET.

It is feasible to conduct a randomized, blinded, sham control trail to study the impact of acupuncture on IVF success rates. Such a protocol is well accepted by patients. Preliminary data shows a statistically significant improvement in the biochemical pregnancy rate with acupuncture treatment. Additionally, acupuncture was associated with a strong trend towards higher clinical pregnancy rates and take home baby rates, though more patients will need to be studied to reach any final conclusions.

Significant increases in pregnancy outcomes were confirmed by this study and the data uniquely supported the advantage of acupuncture in patients with normal Pulsatility index. We also demonstrated that both acupuncture treatment protocols could be used together with a synergistic effect. Finally, this study is the first to demonstrate that the use of acupuncture in patients with poor prognosis (elevated peak FSH, longer history of infertility, poor sperm morphology) can achieve similar pregnancy rates to normal prognosis patients.

Acupuncture seems to be a useful tool for improving pregnancy rate after ART. Clinical pregnancies were documented in 34 of 80 patients (42.5%) in the acupuncture group, whereas pregnancy rate was only 26.3% (21 out of 80 patients) in the control group.

Acupuncture improves ovarion response to gonadotropins. When IVF is combined with standard acupuncture, a significantly lower amount of gonadotropins are used. A 70% pregnancy rate was also achieved with standard acupuncture and IVF, compared to 25% . Larger prospective trails are necessary.

Perhaps these positive results are related to two important factors. The treatments were performed on-site, eliminating the stress of traveling to another site before and after the embryo transfer. Also, the acupuncture treatment protocol did not follow the traditional Paulus protocol, thereby suggesting there is still more research to be done on how best to treat infertility issues with acupuncture.

The treatment of idiopathic male infertility could benefit from employing acupuncture. A general improvement of sperm quality, specifically in the ultrastructural integrity of spermatozoa, was seen after acupuncture, although we did not identify specific sperm pathologies that could be particularly sensitive to this therapy.

This small clinical trial randomized 57 patients who had extremely low sperm counts to acupuncture and placebo acupuncture groups. After receiving acupuncture twice a week for 6 weeks, motility of sperm (but no overall count) was found to increase significantly. The authors concluded that the results of the present study support the significance of acupuncture in male patients with severe oligoasthenozzospermia. More evidence with larger trials needs to be accumulated before the efficacy and effectiveness of acupuncture in male infertility can be evaluated.